NOW THAT THE tourists are here, it’s easy to remember why there’s a season on them.
The Olympic Peninsula is a recreational wonderland that encompasses a diverse variety of really cool biomes from ocean beaches to rainforests to alpine tundra and glaciers.
Tourists come here from all over the world to clog up our roads and ask stupid questions like, “Is this river salt water or fresh? Does this river come from Alaska? When do the deer turn into elk?”
No kidding. These are actual tourist questions that I, as an ambassador of the tourist industry, must answer on a daily basis while keeping a serious face and serious demeanor.
Luckily, tourist season is different than the fishing or hunting seasons. There is no limit and it is still legal to bait the tourists.
Misleading the tourists is a form of amusement the locals have enjoyed since the first European visitors arrived. The Native Americans routinely told the first explorers that not one of them ever went up into the mountains because they were haunted by everything from hairy giants to a thunderbird that was big enough to pick whales out of the ocean and drop them on the glacier to refrigerate them for later use.
Recent archaeological discoveries and tribal testimonies have shown the Olympics were inhabited by the tribes for thousands of years with camps and trails all through the mountains. Obviously, the Native Americans wanted to keep it for themselves and not ruin it all by blabbing.
Our pioneer forefathers had their own ideas about baiting tourists. Many of them claimed to know exactly what was up in the rugged interior of the Olympic mountains. They said all you had to do was push a boat up the river and you would find a lake and prairies where the Indians were still hunting buffalo.
The surrounding mountains were rich with mother lodes of precious metals just waiting for a generous influx of venture capital. Tourists were told of the great mineral wealth that was waiting to be discovered in the Olympics. Mountains, streams and lakes were named after the gold, silver and iron you were sure to find if you had the right equipment. Promotions like these put Oil City on the map.
Then the government came up with a new way to bait the tourists.
They said the Elwha Dam removal experiment would allow an estimated historic run of 400,000 salmon to return to the river. We didn’t tell the tourists that our other rivers that have never had dams don’t have their historic runs of fish in them either. Or even mention the fishing moratorium on the Elwha River has been extended from five to 13 years due to the failure of the salmon to return. There is no need to confuse the tourists with the ugly truth.
Still, that was no excuse for me to tell the tourists that otters make great emotional support pets. That all you have to do is pick them up by the tail and cuddle with them until they calmed down.
And I should never have told the teenage drivers that a driver’s learning permit would get them into the Forks Fourth of July demolition derby.
“What’s a demolition derby?” they asked.
They really were tourists.
I told them it was a great American tradition of driving around an abandoned field, smashing into other cars, where the last one running wins. I said they could compete in their rental car if their mom bought the insurance.
Mom said OK, so they left for Forks to win the demo derby.
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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.
He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.
